If

If you are reading this blog, it's probably not the only one you read. You might read it because you know me, or, more likely, you found it somehow--you clicked on a comment, or followed a link, and wound up here. And for whatever reason, you've been coming back, every so often or even every day.

There are lots of reasons to make a blog a regular stop. The blogs that are bookmarked on my computer are all there for different reasons. There are the blogs of people I know, and the crafty blogs--the people who share my fascination for all things related to sticks and string. There are Jewish blogs and infertility blogs and mommy blogs and aliyah blogs, or blogs that are some of each. Each one I like because the person writing speaks to me in some way--either because we share some set of experiences, or because I feel like we could be friends, or because I feel like I have something to learn from them.

I check MO Chassid's blog every day. I read it because I think I can learn something about parenting there, and I read it because he and his wife are foster parents for Ohel.

Ohel does lots of important things. One of their services is foster care. What this means is that if a Jewish child in New York City is removed from their home by the city administration for children's services, and requires a Jewish placement, the city will first call OHEL. OHEL has 24 hours to find the child a Jewish foster home. If you're not Orthodox, this may not seem like a big deal-but imagine the trauma any child being removed from his or her family already feels, and then imagine that child, used to Shabbos and kashrus and tznius and shul, winding up in a family where lunch is ham and cheese and there is church on Sundays.

The MOC family takes in these foster kids, and has been doing so for years.

Right now they are fostering a toddler, so if you visit his blog you can read about her. Over the last few years, they have fostered a boy MOC refers to as Fosterboy. He's twelve now, and up for adoption. It's not an easy placement; he has emotional issues and learning problems, and right now is in a residential facility where they are being addressed. He needs a family--an Orthodox family--who will be able to deal with that, and take care of him, and give him what he needs: love, stability, patience, and a home of his own.

I don't get into it in detail on my own blog (for about a billion good reasons) but as I've mentioned in passing a few times, I am not (so far as I know) biologically an orphan but for all practical purposes I have no family other than the one I've made with my husband and Hashem. The story is long, complex, and not happy. I'm okay now, because now I have a new family. But back when I was twelve, I was not okay.

That's why, if you or someone you know might be able to give a better home to a different twelve-year-old, I'd like to ask you to read this.